From Maia Mikhaluk in Kyiv (393rd day): When Danny and I were together, we were talking about how hard it has been since the invazion started to find a book that would capture and keep your attention. My mind keeps drifting away from the story in the book. When I try to read something light I get annoyed, when I read something heavy, I start wondering if I need any more heaviness coming from fiction than what I already have in reality.
Danny recommended to me this book The Plum Trees by Victoria Shorr that he is reading now and I have been listening to its audio version on my way home. It describes the horrors of the Holocaust, following a story of one family from Czechoslovakia, from the time when their German neighbors/friends took over their home to their horrific experiences in Auschwitz. As Danny observed there are so many parallels between what is described in the book and the accounts of the cruelty of ruzzzian invaders on occupied territories, in prisons and torture chambers, in filtration camps that ruzzzians are establishing when they occupy our land. The only difference is that ruzzzians lack efficiency that was created by camps like Auschwitz, but inhumane cruelty is definitely there.
Wars bring out the best and the worst in people. It’s not the first book about the horrors of war that I read, and we have been living in a “book” like that for 393 days now in a personal way. Still, whenever I encounter the stories of this utter degradation of humanity, it’s hard not to wonder how it became possible to fall so low, to become so heartless, to cause so much suffering. A similar question was in the historic non-fiction novel by Slavenka Drakulic They Would Never Hurt a Fly which explores the personalities of the war criminals of former Yugoslavia. “Who were they? Ordinary people like you or me—or monsters?”
“The human heart is the most deceitful of all things and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is? “(Jeremiah 17:9).
Voice of Ukraine 
One response to “3/25/2023 – War and trying to read a book”
“The Lord of the Rings”, esp. “Return of the King” as Frodo (the main character) is captured, off-screen interrogated, crawls with his fellow-soldier though enemy territory, trying to fullfill a mission with diminishing hope and finally NO hope of getting back alive, and PTSD for years after succeeding. Written by J.R.R. Tolkien, a veteran of WWI and WWII. Prof.Tolkien insisted it is NOT an allegory, but you can tell the depth of experience behind his fiction.
“Bambi, a life in the woods” by Felix Salten, 1923. The experiences of a roe deer growing up in fear of an enemy no deer can understand or defeat. His father is absent, his mother disappears during one terror-filled attack (many hunters keep all the forest fleeing and dying), one of his friends vanishes as a fawn and returns brain-washed (a ‘pet’ deer returned to the wild, with no fear now of man). Then one of the last lines of the book: standing beside a dead poacher (killed by a game-warden) “HE isn’t all-powerful… there is Another, over us and over Him.”
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